Gov. Jerry Brown waves as he’s applauded by Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, and Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, before giving his annual State of the State speech. Brown’s speech on Thursday felt at times like a victory lap for the four-term governor. (Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee via AP)

SACRAMENTO — For a politician who winces at the L-word — “legacy” — Gov. Jerry Brown spent much of his State of the State address on Thursday defending the key projects and policies that will likely define his: the state’s beleaguered bullet train, his Delta tunnel plan and criminal justice reforms reducing California’s prison population. And he vowed to fight for the state’s controversial gas tax hike as a campaign to repeal it heats up.

“California is setting the pace for the entire nation,” Brown said in his 16th and final State of the State speech.

“Yes, there are critics, there are lawsuits — lots of them — and there are countless obstacles,” he said of the high-speed rail project, “but California was built on dreams and perseverance, and the bolder path is still our way forward.”

The speech came off at times as a muted victory lap for Brown, a fixture on California’s political scene for almost a half-century.

California was still in economic free-fall from the Great Recession when he was inaugurated in January 2011, and the state’s budget deficit was $27 billion. Brown’s final budget, which he released earlier this month, features a $6.1 billion surplus. The state’s unemployment rate is at 4.3 percent, a record low and a steep drop from the 12 percent Brown inherited.

California “demonstrates that some American governments can actually get things done — even in the face of deepening partisan division,” Brown said.

He warned of continuing devastation from natural disasters, predicting that the floods, fires and mudslides that have ravaged the state in the last year would only get worse with climate change. He said he would convene a team of scientists, forestry industry officials and other experts to recommend ways that the state can better manage its tens of millions of acres of forests, which stretch from the Oregon border to the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles.

“We can’t fight nature,” Brown said. “We have to learn how to get along with her.”

Barbara O’Connor, a professor emeritus of communications at Sacramento State and a former Brown appointee to the state public broadcasting commission, said the speech was vintage Brown, with a mix of gravitas, a focus on policy and sardonic humor.

“You can see how he’s grown into the job,” said O’Connor, who has watched all 16 of Brown’s annual speeches.

Even as California Democrats up and down the ballot have refashioned themselves as bulwarks against President Donald Trump, Brown seemed determined not to let the president steal his focus during his last year as governor. He directly criticized the president only once, calling him out for doubting climate change.

“Here in California, we follow a different path,” Brown said.

Brown still has quite a bit of unfinished business left for the 347 days before he departs the state Capitol for his family ranch in Colusa County. The San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed rail train he’s championed has been mired in lawsuits and cost overruns — and he’s had to scale down his $17 billion plan to tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in the face of political opposition.

He said both projects were necessary for the state’s well-being. The high-speed train is worth the rising costs, the self-described rail buff argued, noting that “it will be fast, quiet and powered by renewable electricity and — best of all — last for a hundred years.”

Brown also vowed to protect several other of his signature policies that are under threat, including last year’s 12-cent gas tax increase to fund road repairs.

“I will do everything in my power to defeat any repeal effort that may make it to the ballot,” Brown said to sustained applause from Democratic lawmakers.

The governor also hailed the success of criminal justice policies he pushed to reduce the state’s booming prison population, even as Republicans and some prosecutors are hoping to undo them. And he called for more mental health and drug treatment programs.

Brown said that the state will use funding from Proposition 1, a massive water bond approved during the height of the drought in 2014, to build new dams, reservoirs and groundwater storage. Last week, his California Water Commission alarmed water agencies when its staff said that none of the 11 projects that have applied for $2.7 billion in the measure’s funding scored well on cost-benefit tests, leading to fears that none or only a handful of projects would be funded.

“We will soon begin expending funds on some of the storage we’ve needed for decades,” Brown said. “As the climate changes and more water arrives as rain instead of snow, it is crucial that we are able to capture the overflow in a timely and responsible way.”

On health care, he gave a shout-out to the Republican U.S. senators who voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act last year. “Thank God for John McCain, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins,” Brown declared.

He didn’t mention several of the state’s other biggest challenges, including sky-high housing costs and rising homelessness rates. He also didn’t refer to the sexual harassment scandals that have gripped the state Legislature, although he heralded protesters who poured onto California streets last Saturday for the recent Women’s Marches.

The governor worked on the speech over the past few weeks from his desk on the third floor of the Executive Mansion and practiced it in front of the first lady and the first dog last night, aides said.

While Brown included fewer of the literary and philosophical flourishes that have peppered many of his past addresses, he closed with a reference to his great-grandfather, August Schuckman, a German immigrant who sailed to America in 1849.

“We too will persist against storms and turmoil, obstacles great and small,” Brown said.

Brown was met with multiple standing ovations from the Democrat-dominated Legislature.

“If he had four more years, I’m sure there’d be a lot of support for him in this room,” said Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland. “He was saying, ‘I have one more year of work to do’ — not looking back, looking forward.”

Republican lawmakers said they were thankful for Brown’s work to balance the budget over the last eight years but that his picture of the state was too rosy. “We’re dying from a thousand cuts as business owners in California even though the government’s doing great,” said Assemblyman Brian Dahle, R-Bieber, the GOP leader in the Assembly.

Sacramento State’s O’Connor said she liked Brown’s final speech to the Legislature a lot better than his first one.

In that first inaugural speech on Jan. 7, 1975 — which took the place of Brown’s State of the State that year — the 36-year-old Brown addressed the Legislature from under a pair of bushy eyebrows. He laid out a list of problems California faced, including “the depletion of our resources, the threat to the environment, the uncertainty of our economy and the monetary system, the lack of faith in government, the drift in political and moral leadership.”

Forty-three years later, his messaging was remarkably consistent. The main difference, O’Connor said, was that he’s “gotten better at articulating his vision in a plainspoken way — and with great enthusiasm.”

Casey Tolan covers national politics and the Trump administration for the Bay Area News Group. Previously, he was a reporter for the news website Fusion, where he covered criminal justice, immigration, and politics. His reporting has also been published in CNN, Slate, the Village Voice, the Texas Observer, the Daily Beast and other news outlets. Casey grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and graduated from Columbia University.